Chapter 5

VIRTUAL REALITY ANDSPACE TOURISM

Katarina Damjanov

David Crouch

University of Western Australia

Abstract: Virtual reality technologies have given rise to a new breedof space travel, enabling touring of cosmic environments withoutleaving the Earth. These tours democratize participation in spacetourism and expand its itineraries � reproducing while also alteringthe practices of tourism itself. The chapter explores the ways in whichthey alter modes of establishing “authentic” tourism destinations andexperiences, rendering outer space into a stage for the performance ofspace travel, while themselves facilitating novel avenues for its socialorganization and technological assertion. Virtual space tourism notonly reflects the progression and metamorphoses in tourist practiceand production but also has the potential to influence both theaspirations and prospects of our space futures. Keywords: virtual real-ity; experience; media technologies; touring; simulation

INTRODUCTION

During 2016, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Floridaoffered the public exclusive tours of Mars. Rather than launching its visitors

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into orbit and space-shipping them to the neighboring planet, its exhibitionspace was transformed into a Martian landscape. However, there was norusty red dust covering the ground, the hazy pink skies did not appear over-head, and there was no sudden drop in temperature or atmospheric pres-sure. Instead, the room became part of the virtual reality (VR) installationDestination: Mars (2016). Visitors were individually fitted with a headsetwhich enabled them to “walk into” a realistic 3D simulation of the redplanet. Wearing the Microsoft HoloLens, they were able to experience anaugmented or mixed reality in which a virtual rendition of imagery collectedby the sensory apparatus of the Curiosity rover was overlaid upon the lay-out of the exhibition space, allowing them to experience the sensation ofmoving through an alien environment. This was enabled by the adaptationof software called OnSight, originally co-developed by Microsoft andNASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to support Curiosity’s operations byaiding the rover’s command in analyzing terrain and determining pathways.

The sightseers followed Curiosity’s tracks and were led through severalMartian sites by a digital holographic projection of astronaut Buzz Aldrinand rover driver Erisa Hines from Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they touredthe key scientific activities and discoveries that make it possible for the visi-tors to “be there.” Through Destination: Mars terrestrial space touristsshared an “immersive” interaction with the landscape of another planet(see Chapter 2 for discussion of terrestrial space tourism). While unique,this experience of touring places in outer space from the Earth is becomingincreasingly common; this VR attraction set on Mars signposts far widerdevelopments in VR technologies, in the practice and production of tour-ism and in the nature of space travel.

Destination: Mars is just one of the many virtual tours that feature outerspace in their itineraries. There is an increasing host of VR packages thatoffer forms of tourism set beyond the globe. They span a range of destina-tions, proposing journeys across our solar system and beyond � from a 3DVirtual Tour of the International Space Station to StarTracker VR �Mobile Sky Map (2016), which enables its user to “dive into a 3D starfield” (2016, n.p.). Generated from the imagery and data gathered throughthe enterprise of space exploration, these tours combine diverse virtualinterfaces with equipment such as goggles and headsets, wands, datagloves, and head-mounted displays to provide immersive simulations ofenvironments in which to move, see, and interact with virtual artefacts. Arange of them can be accessed through desktop computers, laptops, tablets,smartphones, and gaming consoles at home or while on move. Others arepresented at public forums for group experiences such as Destination:

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Mars, or Lockheed Martin’s Mars Experience (2017), which transformed aschool bus into a setting for a trip to Mars, its windows acting as thescreens through which to experience a virtual journey on the red planet.Increasingly “out there” in their varied forms, these virtual tours not onlyregister a popular interest in outer space, but also suggest the emergence ofa distinct form of space tourism � one which harnesses the intermediationof technologies, the synthesizing possibilities of VR, and our collective aspi-ration toward outer space.

The proliferation of these remote space tours emerges from ongoingdevelopments in VR technologies. Since hesitant beginnings in the late twen-tieth century, VR technology has grown significantly in scale. Advances inhardware and software � in particular the rise of affordable domestic head-sets such as Google Cardboard, Microsoft HoloLens, HTC Vive, SamsungGear VR, and Oculus Rift � have brought VR to the masses, providingwhat they describe as “fully immersive” experiences “with realistic graphics,directional audio and HD haptic feedback” (HTC Vive, n.d., n.p.).Propelled by ever-present market forces, the consumption of virtual realitieshas become an everyday activity for many, with “reaches far beyond gamingand entertainment” (Scolaro, 2016, n.p.), and it is anticipated that consumerspending on VR will grow from “$108.8 million in 2014 to $21.8 billionworldwide by 2020” (Ewalt, 2015, n.p.).

The virtual tour has thus far emerged as one of the most noteworthyand popular forms of VR application; tourism industries themselvesincreasingly incorporate them in order to market their products, to inspireconsumers, and to enhance their experience of certain destinations.However, VR is used not only as a means of attracting visitors to museums,galleries, noteworthy places and panoramas, or particular hotels andresorts, but also as a form of tourism itself. Its purview is to give a previewof a destination, and also to enable an intrinsic kind of “armchair” travel.VR tours have increased not only the overall numbers of those who can beconsidered “tourists”, but also the display of destinations exponentially �their synthetic worlds now even take the users to locations that they wouldotherwise be unable to visit, places which are expensive, dangerous, orimpossible to reach. It is no surprise, then, that outer space is one of thekey directions being taken by the evolving courses of virtual tourism. It isan inhuman environment, financially and logistically inaccessible to most,and thus far very few have toured it. Set in outer space, the VR tour pro-mises the experience of traveling its expanses while never leaving the Earth.As a means of exploring the cosmos, it might thus also indicate the evolu-tion of space travel, in general, and of space tourism in particular.

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The design of these armchair tours emerges from transactions betweenthe hard-science and creative industries which gather around the exotica ofouter space to provide novel, virtual modes of its exploration. VR technol-ogies are prominently used for astronaut-training simulations and a rangeof space activities such as scientific research, planning, and aerospace engi-neering. For example, a HoloLens aboard the ISS is used to “provide vir-tual aid to astronauts” (NASA, 2015, n.p.), augmenting procedures withholographic images superimposed onto objects the astronaut is interactingwith and allowing those on the Earth to “see from an astronaut’s point-of-view and send them drawings and other visual instructions on how to com-plete tasks” (Franzen, 2016, n.p.).

NASA has developed various VR applications designed to advance andbolster space endeavors, such as systems that assist “scientists in planningrover drives and even holding meetings on Mars” and make “studyingMartian geology as intuitive as turning your head and walking around”(NASA, 2017a, 2017b, n.p.). These virtual advances in outer space areincreasingly finding their way into public culture. Destination: Mars (2016),for instance, was not only adapted from the VR set-up used in Mars opera-tions, but after its time as an attraction in Florida, it was further re-developed into a freely available application � Access Mars: A WebVRExperiment (2017), which now allows “anyone with an Internet connection[to] take a guided tour of what […] scientists experience” (NASA, 2017a,2017b, n.p.). Part of an interest in outer space and its exploration morebroadly � transposed from the fields of science to the marketplace � suchproducts have, in other words, opened up the cosmos as a public touristdomain. Combining educational and entertainment content with the nov-elty of virtual environments, they contribute to the gradual domesticationof outer space and the socialization of its exploration � moving space tour-ism from the province of the very few, into the realm of the masses.

VR tours set in outer space are the outcome of ongoing innovations ininformatics, media, and communication technologies that have been pro-foundly altering the domain of tourism. Facilitating the production, circula-tion, and consumption of tourist sights and experiences, these developmentshave not only complemented, but also increasingly constituted, the registersof travel. These technologic conditions have created a situation in which tour-ist experiences are no longer only contained within classic modes of travel butalso exist as an experience of “simulated mobility through the incredible fluid-ity of multiple signs and electronic images” (Urry, 1995, p. 148). As part ofthis, VR augments tourism. The VR experience is equated with tourist experi-ences, contributing to a more general movement which conflates real and

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representational spaces, meaning places are not “fixed or given”, but “emergeas ‘tourist places’” when they are “assembled” or “produced through net-worked mobilities of capital, persons, objects, signs and information” � as“places to play” (Urry & Larsen, 2011, p. 119). At the same time, VR toursof space extend the arena of tourism beyond the confines of the globe, afford-ing the experience of space travel for all. As part of the new socio-spatialinterface that complicates distinctions between home and away, the presenceand the absence, authentic and staged (Hannam, Butler, & Paris, 2014), theyamplify the metamorphoses that technologic advances have conferred upontourist modes and suggest the prospective forms they may take.

The effects of VR space tourism are many and varied, and their reper-cussions are yet to be established. VR itself is still an emerging medium,and extraterrestrial tours still an undeveloped manner of travel. However,our primary aim in this chapter is to review the recent and current forms ofvirtual space tours in their nascent stages, to chart their proliferation andgrowing sophistication by providing examples of their different manifesta-tions, emphases, and the range of locations they include in their itineraries.We consider how these synthetic spaces transpose the practice of touringinto outer space, explore how virtual space travel might influence the con-stitution of our “touristic” disposition, and suggest some of the changesthat VR space tours appear to introduce into the broad motivations under-girding our desire to “go beyond.”

Outlining the range of “immersive” experiences offered to VR spacetourists, we suggest that this medium not only appears to widen the stageupon which we are able to perform the role of tourist � elongating itsacquisitive gaze and complicating its prerequisites of physical presence �but also contributes to the greater mapping of outer space as a tourist site.We close with a brief consideration of the potential limitations and futurepossibilities of virtual tourism in outer space, reflecting upon the ways inwhich these tours technologically extend the tourist into the spectacle ofspace exploration as well as reveal a social and organizational capacity toinfluence the direction of space tourism and also our collective aspirationsin outer space � to determine, in other words, the very conditions of howwe approach, arrange, conquer, or acquire, new places to travel.

VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCES OF SPACE TOURISM

Accelerations of interest and investment in progressing the itineraries ofspace tourism and the capacity and applications of VR technologies have

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rendered outer space into an infinitively travelable site. While the journeysof the very few tourists who have ventured beyond the globe have consistedmostly of visits to the ISS, the affordances of VR are permitting spacetravel into myriad other destinations, supplying tours of popular celestialbodies such as the Moon and Mars or more exotic locations such as theplanet “40 light years away” featured in NASA VR: On the Surface ofPlanet TRAPPIST-1d (2017, n.p.). VR technologies have the potential tochange not only the entertainment industries, information consumption,and the mobility of the masses, but also the way we interact with the world.If on the Earth, virtual travel enables “transcending geographical and oftensocial distance through information and communications technology”(Szerszynski & Urry, 2006, p. 116), set in outer space, it “transcends” theterrestrial geographies of this world, redefining the ambits of tourism andour relationship with outer space. VR space tours compound the noveltiesof a virtual environment and space travel; this amalgam, in which bothform and content appear new and different, gives birth to a tourist who ispart of a “culture of flows” and the hybrid “spaces of ‘in-betweenness’”(Rojek & Urry, 1997, p. 11). However, the question that continues toundergird “virtual tourism” (and the idea of simulated travel and move-ment more generally) concerns the authenticity of the experience itself; as asetting, outer space only further complicates this uncertain and undecidedpurview.

What we know of the experience of space travel can only be garneredfrom the limited records of people who can claim first-hand experience, butwhat we do know of outer space is that it is essentially an inhuman envi-ronment, a place in which our presence is both restricted to temporarysojourns and necessarily sustained by technology, where all humans are ineffect tourists. By crafting an interpretation of outer space based upon thewealth of techno-scientific data generated through its observation andexploration, VR tours strive to simulate a realistic sense of presence “outthere”, attempting to bring their audiences as closely as possible to the cos-mos without having to leave the Earth. But there are limits to this, andthere are as yet no “genuine” replications of inhuman space environmentsas VR experiences. While a VR gaming simulation like Adr1ft (2016) mightrealistically recreate the “nauseating” and enclosed sensation of floating inzero gravity in a spacesuit, it disregards most of the physics and atmo-spheric effects of outer space � which ultimately undercuts the illusion ofreal presence that it sets out to establish. Similarly, Destination: Mars(2016) makes it possible to “walk on Mars” in the steps of rovers withoutthe need for oxygen or any thought given to the effects of radiation or a

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different surface gravity; the authenticity of the experience wavers at therealization that Mars is a place where we cannot be without technologicalartifice. Yet, it is perhaps also the realization of this utter reliance upontechnologies that returns a certain authenticity to the prosthetic VRexperience.

While travel in outer space means surrounding yourself in a “bubble” ofmediating technologies, touring in VR is an immersion in a technologicallycreated digital environment. In this sense, VR technology could be asuitable substitute for real space travel; technological necessity makes theexperience of one continuous with the other. That said, VR space tours arenonetheless consistently concerned with their own presentation or perfor-mance of a “real” experience. What the VR industry categorizes under thede facto term experiences are packaged and presented as interactive real-timesimulations. For example, a variety of space apps offered through Oculus likeHello Mars (2017) and its rendition of the “7 minutes of terror” landingsequence “created strictly based on NASA’s public data & research” (Oculus,2018a), Solar System (2015) in which one “can almost feel the structure ofdistant planets and moons under the feet” (Oculus, 2018b, n.p.), orDiscovering Space 2 (2017), which lets one “[e]xperience the mood and atmo-sphere of worlds far away from home” (Oculus, 2018c, n.p.) � are all (amongmany others) marketed as in some way “realistic” experiences. This authentic-ity is, however, produced through their design � the hardware and softwarethat they rely upon becoming a necessary part of the equation, influencingquestions of perception, imitation, and reality. These mimetic environmentsare increasing in sophistication, becoming more precise, more accurate, butalso more able to trick the eyes and mind, and at the same time, they arebecoming more accepted as legitimate sites of social practice and authenticinteraction.

If the “touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authenticexperiences” (MacCannell, 2013, p. 101), then the consciousness of the VRtourist complicates our conceptions of what is authentic and reopens ques-tions of what is “real” experience. It is an experience of travel that occursonly through the simulation of presence and interaction with a syntheticenvironment, and while tourists might “enter” these “tourist areas preciselybecause their experiences there will not, for them, be routine”, they perhapscast aside “a quest for authentic experiences, perceptions and insights”(MacCannell, 2013, p. 106). While their authenticity might be wholly“staged” (MacCannell, 2013, p. 91), VR tours nonetheless concentrate adistinct form of what Wang describes as the “activity-related situation” of“existential authenticity” (1999, p. 350). Unconcerned with originals and

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lacking physical substance � but also not entirely the “constructed” prod-uct of the imagination � the forms of authenticity that VR tourism navi-gates are related to both individual activity and technical fidelity ratherthan the original aura, or the symbolic “social construction” of certain“objects” (Wang, 1999, p. 352). The authenticity here instead lies in the VRexperience of space itself � and the validity of a mediated experience,whereby our sense of presence is established through technology. As Wangpoints out, the emotive experience of something as authentic is not merelyan “effect” that “necessarily entails, coincides with, or results from the epis-temological experience of a ‘real’ world out there” (1999, pp. 350, 352,351); the experience accords with particular ways of relating to and encoun-tering things.

VR tourists in space do not wander about as if they were in a museum,captivated by the experience of being in the presence of authentic things,nor do they feel the weight of places made, constructed, judged, or autho-rized as authentic; rather than questions of “whether and how the touredobjects are authentic”, the “existential experience” of this mode of tourism“involves personal or intersubjective feelings activated by the liminal pro-cess of tourist activities” (Wang, 1999, p. 351) themselves. As a product of“contrivance” (Cohen, 1995), the VR experience is then in part a projectionof the tourist self onto the technologic possibilities of the medium � incor-poration of new conducts of experiencing the world. Synthesizing elaborate“non-places” (Auge, 1995, p. 78) that convey the impression of being both“everywhere and nowhere”, VR enacts a placelessness characteristic of digi-tal environments � the world as information exchanges and mediatedspaces � an experience of “post-place.” Suggesting “the interdependencies”and “increasing convergence” between “changes in physical movement andin electronic communications” (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006, p. 4), itoffers the “assemblage” (Germann Molz & Paris, 2015, p. 175) of touristplaces � and new constructions or conceptions of spatial experience, thatmight require new notions of place. In this sense, VR itself might eventuallydefine our experience of the extraterrestrial � a suggestion which onlyprompts further questions of how tourist experiences of “pre-prepared real-ities” might come to express our collective sense of occupation and movingin place and space.

While VR itself complicates the geographical nature of tourism, VR inouter space adds still more problematics to the idea that tourist practiceinvolves material experience, a corporeal sense of presence. If real tourismis about “being there” � about a material, bodily experience of physicalthings � “to be there oneself”, as Urry and Larsen describe, “is what is

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crucial in most tourism” (2011, p. 21) � then the disembodied simulacra ofvirtual space can offer little in the way of a “real tourist experience.” In vir-tual tourism in outer space those things which are said to drive the urge tophysically travel to particular places � such as Urry’s (2007) notions of“corporeal proximity” and “compulsion to proximity” � appear to besubsumed by the practices of digital reproduction, duplication, and thescreen-based cultures and customs of contemporary information and mediatechnologies. This is not to say that VR erases the need for physical spaceor replaces bodily experience with something that is purely immaterial. Allforms of VR space tours necessitate some material provisions (involvingthe bodies of tourists and often-cumbersome equipment) and occur in cer-tain physical spaces, but this terrestrial arrangement is only a stage itself,set to be overlaid with virtualizations of data and images designed to min-gle with and manipulate the senses.

VR space tours incorporate various virtualization techniques to simulateas-immersive-as-possible environments and enhance a sense of presence.For example, Lockheed Martin’s Mars Experience (2017) includes a gigan-tic Martian dust storm with atmospheric effects added to the transparentHD displays that filled the windows of the moving school bus. While VRpresence is still primarily evoked through sight, such experiences alsoinvolve haptic controls, vibrating grips, analog joysticks, rolling balls, but-tons and triggers; while “touch controllers” provide “intuitive hand pres-ence in VR � the feeling that your virtual hands are actually your own”(Oculus Rift, 2018, n.p.), a set of sensors track and translate the movementof the body into VR. VR equipment is hand-controlled and “hands on”(adding kinds of tactility into the activity and experience of navigation).There have been many other examples in which bodily sensation is blendedwith virtual imagery: experiments visually enhancing the experience ofweightlessness accompanying human space travel, for instance, theEarthlightVR (2017) display, which used HTC Vive in combination withvisual and tactile effects to simulate the experience of spaceflight training.VR tourisms are increasingly directed toward different forms of sensing theexternal world and indicate the potential to become truly multisensorial.However, their fusion between the body and technology suggests a newkind of “sensorium”, a new medium of sensory experience that suits a placeof expanded optics and multiple, manipulable gravities. Encouraging anintertwining of the tourist and technology, virtual travel in space validates“accounts of tourism as embodied, multi-sensuous and technologized per-formances” (Muecke & Wergin, 2014, p. 228), while making possible“effects and sensations that would otherwise be beyond human experience”

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(Haldrup & Larsen, 2006, p. 285). Grounded in what Virilio describes asan “innovation of artificial vision,” these interpretations of outer spaceinvolve “delegating the analysis of objective reality to a machine” � andproliferate as a symptom of “the new industrialization of vision” and the“growth of a veritable market in synthetic perception” (1994, p. 59).

If authenticity itself no longer appears as an objective quality, then ittoo is only ever constructed. In VR, the quest for real experiences of exoticplaces becomes the quest for places that are well-staged (minutely stage-managed as “authentic experience”). This substitution is in part legitimatedthrough social constructions but also in the pleasures of reflexive play andthe coded “enjoyment” of digital “surfaces” (Cohen, 1995). However, asWang describes, once something “is turned into a kind of tourist activity, itconstitutes an alternative source of authenticity” (1999, p. 359). When con-structed in outer space, these “alternative authenticities” are again re-framed, and through the technologies of VR, the act of substitutionbecomes a form of compensation, a matter of surrogate activity.

Using a prepared and prearranged choreography, VR tours offer anoptical, symbolic, sensorial, and above all potentially “enchanting experi-ence” (Bærenholdt, 2016, p. 407). This is what Bærenholdt describes as “arelational accomplishment that requires both the performance of visiting‘experiencers’ and the affordance of the spatial design of the place and arte-facts visited” (2016, p. 407). While individually negotiating their experi-ences, virtual space tourists themselves become involved in processesstructuring the “emerging authenticity” (Cohen, 1988) of extraterrestrialdestinations and ultimately “authenticate” tourist places beyond the Earth.If authenticity is performative (Wang, 1999; Zhu, 2012) and “connective”(Bærenholdt, 2016, p. 400), then the “immersion” of VR itself becomes aprocess of what Cohen and Cohen (2012a, 2012b) call “authentication.”This is not a matter of discerning truth, but instead, as Bærenholdt puts it,an awareness of the play of “real-fake tensions” (2016, p. 401). From thisperspective, the experiences of VR tours are “authenticated” as the touredobjects and sites are experienced as “real”, despite an awareness of the illu-sion that underlies them. A tourist in virtual outer space might “almostdelight in inauthenticity”, knowing “that there is no authentic tourist expe-rience” (Urry, 1995, p. 140), neither on the Earth nor outside it.

While tourism might transform “authentic” spaces into settingssuitable for its ongoing operation, the extraplanetary environment hasno “ordinary flow of life” or any “natural texture of the host society” toreflect, and thus its authenticity is one which is entirely “reconstructed, land-scaped, cleansed of unsuitable elements, staged, managed, and otherwise

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organized” (Cohen, 1972, p. 170). While VR presents a state that is perhaps“more real than reality” (a reality beyond the mundane, an ultra-real experi-ence composed of more than mere simulation), the tourist experience itself isnot independent of the ordinary world. As space tourism, VR might be tech-nically inflected fantasy, but as Wang puts it, “such a fantasy is a real one �it is a fantastic feeling. Despite being a subjective (or intersubjective) feeling,it is real to a tourist and thus accessible to him or her in tourism” (1999,p. 360). Because any space travel itself requires an “environmental bubble,”VR products that offer to technologically extend the tourist’s “generalizedinterest in things beyond” (Cohen, 1972, p. 165) are thus made part of thepractice and production of tourism and recognized as genuine experienceswithin its registers.

Staging Tourist Sites

Virtual space tours emerge from our relative absence beyond the planet.Although the humans who venture off the Earth have only been as far asthe Moon, ever-increasing portions of outer space have already been wellcharted and mapped, scrutinized and classified with increasing detail,including areas in which no human has yet arrived. Our progressivelysophisticated digital maps of extraterrestrial space (which are virtual spacesin themselves) are inscribed with cartographic symbols, names of topo-graphical features, celestial objects, formations and events, discovery datesand the courses of past missions, suggesting points of human interest, or atleast human bearing, and marking out our exploratory ventures into space.Outer space in this sense appears as a destination already plotted with tour-ist itineraries, with the equivalent of brochures, postcards, and travelinformation.

VR space tours develop directly from these extrapolations of spaceexploration; they are set in a pre-emptively coded space and themselves“package” it for consumption. As such, they may afford the impressionthat everything has been done already � a virtual environment accessedhundreds of thousands of times might not elicit a sense of discovery or sug-gest the experience of exploring the untouched territory. Yet, it is in thispre-ordained process that places are marked as and become tourist destina-tions, complete with identifiable spots to visit, routes to follow, sights tosee, and sites to consume. Through naming attractions, plotting tours,selectively presenting and manipulating inviting images of significantplaces, and providing celebrity guides as “points of contact”, VR tours

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preset outer space for all the practices and performances that tourism mightinvolve. Incorporated into virtual realities, specific locations like craters onMars or the Moon, technologies like Curiosity and the ISS, and figures likeBuzz Aldrin, themselves become crucial, recognizable, navigational coordi-nates which are vital for preserving the tourist bubble in a space otherwisemostly empty of recognizable human “signs.”

Rendering outer space into a tourist site, VR tours offer new ways oflooking (fresh and multiple perspectives on place) through a combinationof advancing imaging and data visualization techniques and the cutting-edge optics of space exploration; they suggest new formations and reconsti-tutions of what is called the “tourist gaze” (Urry, 2002; Urry & Larsen,2011). In VR, vision is penultimate, the ability to see is still equated withthe freedom to move � a mobile gaze is made to move through the VRenvironment, but there is often the chance to choose destinations as theyappear, to zoom in upon locations at will. The emphasis on sight in thesejourneys confers new possibilities on the embodied tourist gaze (Urry &Larsen, 2011). It is these possibilities in particular which are exploited andencouraged by VR space tourism.

Using information “disembodied” in signal transmissions and re-embodied through a gaze that is situated in place via technology, VR toursof space return elements of sensory, bodily experience to something thatwould otherwise remain abstract. For example, the current prevalence of“360-degree” excursions into space locations employ state-of-the-art videotechnology and the omnidirectional format in order to provide panoramicstudies of optical vertigo such as the European Space Agency’s SpaceStation 360 (2016) tour of the ISS. Many of these provide the tourist animaginary viewpoint, but often also take on the view of particular humansand technologies in space. Russia Today’s panoramic 360-degree videotours of modules of the ISS (best watched through a VR headset) aretaken from the perspectives of astronauts such as Andrey Borisenko, andapplications like Access Mars (2017) involves the tourist “walking onMars” by adopting in part Curiosity’s view and using its optical apparatusto navigate. Offering perspectives anchored by particular people ordevices, VR productions of tourism in space strive to make places likeMars feel both individual and familiar (to give it a human bearing). Inother words, they are another way to mark or make it accessible tohumans. Collecting information as a kind of experience, the gaze of thetourist is “embodied” in the VR environment, and thus these tours areable to duly deliver the tourist into the broader spectacle of spaceexploration.

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Beyond the limited range and vision of human space activities, VR spacetours are also able to provide impossible spectacles, inhuman perspectives,standpoints that are alien, and unfamiliar (even for space technologies suchas rovers). For example, Titans of Space 2.0 (2016) promises to take audi-ences on “a ride” across an “authentic miniature Solar System” with “accu-rate visuals” of “over 40 celestial bodies” and the chance to “squint youreyes in the intense light of a few of the largest known stars” (Oculus, 2018e,n.p.). These tours offer the inhuman ability to fly, dart in very near, andout very far, to jump vast divides and move around huge objects. They pro-vide a God-like omniscient vision through which one can see not only whatindividual technologies and missions have been able to record but also acomposition of what space exploration has been able to grasp. The visualexperience of tourism is thus in a way heightened in virtual realities ofouter space, given dimensions, capacities, and emphasis which not onlyexercise, but enhance, the tourist gaze. These synthetic environments bothcompound the image-saturation of tourism and tourist practice and perpet-uate its dependence upon spectacle. If the tourist gaze is a performativegaze, and VR vision is likewise part of a performance and if space explora-tion itself performs our ability to “see” beyond our planet, then the kind ofperformance delivered in VR space tours involves a very particular set ofpractices that relocate and replace the touring body “out of this world.”

VR experiences involve performing the “tourist” itself, requiring a spacetraveler to perform their own experience. But outer space is nearly emptyof tourist activities. In reality, there is little to do in space: no hotels or res-taurants to try or museums to explore. Striving for realism and similitude,however, these applications avoid elements of fantasy. They, for example,include no encounters with aliens or other life forms (see also Chapter 3).Instead, like all forms of tourism, they provide some form of structuringnarrative to additionally augment a tourist experience. For example, theBBC’s award-winning Home: A VR Spacewalk (2017), which is based onNASA spaceflight training simulations, combines “a compelling narrativewith multisensory technologies like haptics and biofeedback”, opening upthe “emerging possibilities of interactive storytelling” (Melcher, cited inREWIND, 2018, n.p.) that “puts you at the center of the story, taking youon an emotional and personal journey while delivering beautiful, heart-stopping, and memorable moments” (REWIND, 2018, n.p.).

VR tours use varied forms of narrative to immerse the tourist into spaceexploration. Sometimes, they even assign specific roles and tasks such as inthe “NASA approved”, “VR experience” Mars 2030 (2017), which involves“taking on the role of an astronaut” in order to traverse “Mars and collect

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geological samples that uncover the planet’s past” (Fusion Media Group,2017, n.p.). Similarly, Home: A VR Spacewalk (2017) creates an experience“that’ll put you in the (space) shoes of astronauts like Tim Peake” (Svetlik,2017, n.p.), and Mission: ISS (2017) lets the users “learn how to move andwork in zero-gravity” (Oculus, 2018d, n.p.), while Access Mars (2017) andthe “free drive” function of Experience Curiosity (2015) put the tourist incontrol of space technologies like rovers. Placing VR tourists as spaceexplorers � whether human or non-human � these roles and characteriza-tions indicate narrative performances designed to enhance the developmentof an extraplanetary imaginary. However, the narrative forms of thesespace tours only operate within the multiple yet “fixed” settings of outerspace, and there are only certain roles available to perform.

The possibilities for action and activity in a VR space environment aredetermined by the particularities of its digital simulation. In other words,they are “already decided by both the technical procedures and social orga-nization of their terrestrial ‘moorings’” (Damjanov & Crouch, 2018, p. 7).Whether it be a matter of just passing by, casually observing various nebu-lae and a constellation or two, or doing more interactive activities such as“docking cargo capsules, conducting spacewalks, using tools for mainte-nance” (Singletary, 2017, n.p.), the field of possible action has already beenmapped and calculated. Even when set in the future, places are pre-plottedand pre-programmed. For example, Mars 2030 (2017), featuring “40 squarekilometers of open Martian terrain, accurately mapped and modeled usingNASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE satellite data” (FusionMedia Group, 2017, n.p.) allows one to wander Mars with the “displaysfor your suit and rover” showing “biometric data and life support gaugesto add authenticity to the experience” (Moon, 2017, n.p.). It includes a pre-cise set of tasks rehearsing a performance or story of inhabiting Mars: “col-lect samples and then analyze them under the virtual microscope in yourhabitat that’s designed after an actual NASA concept for the first Mars-bound spacefarers” and then follow the steps to “beam your findings backto Earth like a real astronaut would” (Moon, 2017, n.p.). The scriptedform of these interactions means that these “performances” are highly regi-mented by what is known about space but also by our aspirations towardspace. Although these tourist experiences are staged in a pre-emptivelyplotted outer space and require additional inscriptions of it as a tourist site,they themselves pre-plot the future direction of space exploration, envision-ing its settings, actors, and actions. While doing so, they mimic and alsodelimit and condition (even perhaps predetermine) the way our futures inspace might proceed.

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Virtual Reality Futures of Space Travel

The ability to access virtual environments which afford the sensation of“being there” in space stems from the material and social conditions under-pinning the interrelated momentum of technological innovation, the evolu-tion of tourism, and the progress of space exploration. At the same time,the extension of space travel through accessible VR technologies also trans-forms it into a social, everyday practice � into a form of touristic “con-quest” of new domains which may itself shape the circumstances fromwhich it emerges. VR space tours underpin, in other words, what Lefebrvecalls the “historical problematic of conquests” (2004, p. 97), as it nowbegins to appear beyond the globe.

Through their choreography of science and technology, education andentertainment, experience and exploration, they reframe conquest as formsof mediated and momentary occupation, giving a new direction to itsunfolding in outer space. If the contemporary practice of tourism is nowsomething constituted from “a complex ‘assemblage’ of bodies, mobilities,portable technologies, concrete infrastructures, networked spaces, and vir-tual places in which the social and the technological are mutually deter-mined” (Germann Molz & Paris, 2015, p. 176), then VR tourism in spaceextends these terrestrial “assemblages” into potentially infinite spacebeyond the globe. However, these applications also maintain tourism as asocial practice within space that is otherwise empty of relational activity.Thus, they not only reflect terrestrial socio-technical aggregations of tour-ism, but also elongate them outside the globe, and in doing so also indicatethe potential for different kinds of tourist, new ways of seeing, performingand feeling places, new organizations of human movement and extraplane-tary mobility. The ways in which these tours and tourists are incorporatedin our exploratory agendas surrounding outer space might then informhow we domesticate its technologically driven “conquest.”

Just as real space tourism is beginning to be more organized on theEarth through companies such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX � whichpromote and promise future tourist visits to the ISS and suborbital andorbital flights, signposting a potential mass form of space tourism � this isalso true of VR space tours. Like in real space tourism, where a set of keyplayers are already emerging, the organization, the direction, emphasis,and possibilities of the VR space tourism sector is decided by theirproducers � the tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook,which develop particular itineraries and certain experiences. There arealready attempts to impose familiar, “terrestrial” ways of organizing mass

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forms of tourism on the practices of VR tourists in outer space, undertak-ings to arrange and dispose its varied itineraries. For example, TheIntergalactic Travel Bureau VR (2017) app suggests a traditional and frank(albeit satiric) way to order space tours: through the institution of the“tourist agency.” It is designed around a variety of tailored tours andadopts forms of organized mass tourism reminiscent of the tourist “junket”or all-in-one group vacations. This further asserts narratives of tourisminto the broader experience of VR space tours, alongside certain forms ofsociality. What this suggests is that the production and organization ofthese VR space tours might eventually become part of a potential strugglearound the broader “representation” of outer space � that the rights to VRspace tourism will in part involve the right to imagine human itineraries,experiences, and prospects in space. Their location outside the Earth doesnot preclude them from terrestrial matters of power and control. Theimage-politics and strategies of representation of VR space tourism havethe potential to manipulate the masses’ perspectives on outer space, andthus may influence our more concrete approaches to it. Whether outerspace becomes a site of “cosmic commodities” (Cubitt, 1998, p. 68), may bein part resolved as a matter of tourism or, more precisely, as part of theextension of the organization of tourism through VR space travel.

Although VR space tours are in a way a democratization of space travel,whereby the cosmos is organized and laid out as a visual, interactive storyfor the masses, these products are still very much made by the elite and forthe elite. Their tourists are perhaps a different kind of elite. They are notonly tech-savvy and “at home” at a digital interface but, perhaps moreimportantly, those who can afford the time and equipment (or the entry fee)needed to roam synthetic galaxies. Thus, they also imply a different kind oftourist with different tourist imaginaries and appetites. Casting the “com-plex assemblage” of tourism out into space even before real tourists canproperly reach it, they register what Johnson and Martin call the “antici-pated futures of space tourism” (2016, p. 135). Catering for both the VRelite and the “emergent” VR tourist, these space tours both widen the scopeof possibilities for evolving concepts and practices, such as “personal space-flight”, “citizen space exploration”, and also encourage a far broader visionto emerge: one that involves emancipatory kinds of space travel, formedfrom a more individualistic, lifestyle-oriented model. Travel in VR mightsharpen and give three-dimensional form to “the imaginative visioning” ofreal space tourism: the imaginaries “of eventual passengers, and their mobi-lities, that is co-produced with industry representatives and stakeholders”(Johnson & Martin, 2016, p. 148). It extends these imaginaries of

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exploration and future travel through the mediation of techno-enhancedsocial performances of tourism. These tours enable us to envision humanprospects far into space (rehearsing and reflecting the desires and aspira-tions encouraged and engendered by space industry stakeholders) but theyalso present a new instrument for the manipulation and management ofhuman imagination and aspiration.

VR tours extend the general participation of the masses in space explo-ration. They help conceive it as a collective endeavor (even if this is only an“elite” segment of the masses). They do allow a far broader group of peopleto participate in the scientific exploration of outer space. Programs such asAccess Mars (2017), which was originally designed for NASA research intothe topography of the Gale Crater, enables a wholly mass-tourist-orientated “experience” of the virtual modes of space exploration used byscience. This tendency toward encouraging citizen space exploration and“citizen science” is likely to evolve and will just as likely involve VR usersparticipating even more closely in space exploration through popular strat-egies of “crowdsourcing” the collective intelligence to aid scientificresearch. The SpaceVR project, for example, has elaborate plans for furtherintegrating VR technologies with space exploration in the near future.Starting with launching 360-degree VR cameras that will “feed footagefrom low earth orbit back to Earth”, they aim to create the “world’s 1stVirtual Reality (VR) satellite, delivering Cinematic, Live, Virtual SpaceTourism”, in which “consumers can experience space travel in immersivevirtual reality” and through which “anyone can explore the universe”(SpaceVR). While such plans are indicative of the “consumption” of spaceby VR, they also have the potential to both further the democratization ofspace exploration and heighten our collective immersion in it, potentiallyenabling everyone to be involved in its techno-scientific “conquest”.

While VR tours of outer space could soon occur in real time and be con-current with space exploration, they already extend into its prospectivefutures. Usually, space tourists arrive at a location after it has already beensurveyed by professional explorers. For example, it is only after years of occu-pation by astronauts who are officially designated as the “envoys” of humansin space that tourists are permitted to visit the ISS. VR tourists, however, arenot only able to retrace the routes of an astronaut’s exploration, surveying theterritory after it has been conquered, they are themselves also able to partici-pate as our envoys in space. Our Martian futures, for instance, are frequentlyportrayed by VR tourism, anticipating various scenarios regarding our pres-ence on the planet. Mars 2030 (2017) imagines a future astronaut “habitat”,while Mars 2117 (2017) envisions even more distant futures and projects the

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United Arab Emirates’ plans to “build the first settlement on Mars” througha “virtual illustration of what life might look like” (Hale, 2017, n.p.).Although both present different visions of Martian futures and perhaps antici-pate different forms of its conquest, they also bestow their users with the dis-tinction of being our envoys on the red planet. In this process, they also stakea claim to the future tourist imaginaries of Mars, to a particular image andinterpretation of how our interactions with other worlds will unfold.

In addition to these future scenarios, there are more practical and imme-diate plans to integrate VR technologies into real space tourism. For exam-ple, in prospective suborbital tourism, spaceflight will provide the effects ofweightlessness but not offer a good view (of the Earth or of space), so tour-ists could be equipped with VR to extend or complete the experience(Guarino, 2015). While astronauts are already using it on the ISS, perhaps inthe future tourists on the ISS or elsewhere will use goggles and VR toenhance their experience. In the creation of virtual worlds, space explorationitself merges with the tourist story. Like the “prominence of maps and geo-graphical exploration as a narrative trope in ‘cartographic fiction’” (Leotta,2016, n.p.), VR aids in triggering the “tourist imagination” (Crouch,Jackson, & Thompson, 2005). It’s blurring between mediums and media, thesuperimposition of filmic imaginaries, gaming environments, science fiction,with the realities of technology and scientific practice complements, attemptsto tap its symbolic potential. Yet, on the other hand, the dominant way inwhich VR space tours will function in the future might not be to augmenthuman space exploration and tourism, but as a major substitute for it.

The lived experience of space travel might not only remain too expensivefor most � and be so uncomfortable, risky or boring, and the fidelity andcomfort of the VR travel so high � that human travel in space would bemade redundant, as it could be achieved more easily by technologies. Bethat as it may, the merging of virtual and real environments of space explo-ration continues to develop, suggesting that it may eventually becomedifficult to distinguish between the two. As VR is progressively made partof the space exploration through the possibilities of real-time imaging,tele-robotics and three-dimensional printing, it also extends the aspirationsfor space tourism and sculpts the ways in which it evolves.

CONCLUSION

Strapped to your face, VR goggles are prone to fog; sweat can build up onthe insides, which become blurred and humid, and after extended use, red

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marks can rim strained or sore eyes. Some virtual environments are sensitive;if one moves too fast, the fracturing images cause instant headaches. Thecord that connects the system can often entangle the user’s legs, tripping themup. The visual affordances of VR tourism, its “immersive potential” and abil-ity to simulate kinds of embodiment on other worlds, are thus “broughtback” to the Earth by very material bodily requirements and discomforts. Inother words, they are checked by a still-uncomfortable interface between ourbodies and the material assortment of VR technologies, and by the difficultiesencountered in attaching, or accommodating, the apparatus adapting virtualenvironments to physical space. These discomforts and problematics currentlyappear as limiting factors in the development of the kinds of tourist practicethat we have discussed here. It should be acknowledged that VR is still adeveloping medium and that VR tourism in outer space is still in emergingform � and thus our commentary can only be provisional. Yet, as the globalmarket responds to the desires and needs of an already growing populationof virtual space tourists, it seems plausible to expect that along with VR hard-ware and software advances, these forms of travel will continue to transformand develop.

While its current modes might change (and such possibilities mayalready be indicated through the haptic interactivity of augmented andmixed realities), it is the immersive qualities of the VR medium whichappear to offer the most potent forms of change. In the enterprise of spaceexploration, the physical discomforts of VR appear slight. The practicalapplications of not only VR technologies � but also the advantages of hav-ing so many sets of eyes able to observe and record � are many and varied.VR tech has proven useful for walking astronauts through tasks and over-laying instructions and manuals, it has also encouraged a democratic, or atleast demotic, participation in the observation and exploration of outerspace. For example, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Matthew Clausen imag-ined that through VR there is not:

just going to be the astronaut walking around, but there will bemillions of people here on Earth that are untethered from thelimitations that they have, because it will be safe for them tofly above the surface and go ahead of the astronauts and actu-ally help them gather the data. (cited in Lewin, 2016, n.p.)

In this speculation, the whole of outer space is opened up to the surveil-lance by the masses and exposed to the all-seeing, armchair tourist gaze.Here VR operators would be intimately involved in not only a social

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performance of travel and tourism but also a performance of the greaterhuman aspirations toward outer space.

Virtual reality experiences are commonly described as “intense,” andwhile narrative might undergird them, VR itself is not merely a genre. Thenovelties of the medium itself hold potential for influencing the leisure,practice, and spaces of everyday life. As Guttentag suggests, the “guaran-teed experience” (2010, p. 644) of VR tourism might offer a “substitution”for physical travel. As a replacement, it would trigger a variety of potentialtransformations in the ways in which we define authentic experience, estab-lish our presence in particular places, perform our ability to move throughand “capture”, and how we organize the mass exploration of unoccupiedterritory. While much of this potential lies in new visualizations of thesocial interactivity facilitated by flexible networks of digital communica-tions, VR does not have to be a “social” technology (in the narrow sense ofbeing a platform for socializing, for seeing, and being seen). While it hasthat social potential, as demonstrated by various emerging online VR chatspaces, it is also a medium which invites immersive isolation (akin to anisolation tank), a respite from the social interaction of media-saturatedlives. At the same time, VR is also increasingly incorporated into highlypublic, location-based experiences, variants of the Destination: Mars(2016), Earthlight (2017), and the Mars Experience (2017) exhibitions dis-cussed earlier. A future of “VR parks” suggests a different direction in theapplication of the medium that may indicate both the establishment of newkinds of VR tourist and a series of alternate tourist routes. Alternatively,they may fade away as the novelty wanes. In either case, VR tourisms thatare set in outer space appear as a product of supplementation rather thansubstitution.

The social potential of VR might, however, also be seen in a quite differ-ent application of VR in space travel. Rather than transporting those onthe Earth into space, it could be used by both astronauts and space touriststo entertain themselves on long or monotonous missions, distract them-selves from unpleasant sensations and effects, maintain social connections,and prevent isolation. From this perspective, they could themselves tourthe virtual Earth from space. The implications that virtual realities mightpresent for tourism, travel and human mobilities, in general, remain uncer-tain. There appear few real consequences for the virtual space tourist: noimpact is made upon a local culture or ecosystem, and there is little risk ofinjury or death. But while VR might remove the historically negativeimpressions left by tourism, it might also remove its history of adventureand imaginative potential. An enhanced and easily accessible intimacy with

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outer space might have the reverse effect and “extraordinary” touristicexperiences might become routine, standardized, and blurred with the mun-dane (Cohen & Cohen, 2012a, 2012b; Guttentag, 2010). As a form of masstourism, VR might continue the erasure of “heroic travel” (Wang, 1999,p. 352), instead offering the common people an opiate of simulated imagesand “pseudo-events” (Boorstin, 1964) as compensation for the adventure ofreal travel in space. This would remain an activity solely reserved for theelite or very rich. While separated from any real experience of outer space,VR tourists could thus be made to prefer the imitation or at least leftunable to assess its authenticity. Dictated by the design of these virtual real-ities, the touring mass could be controlled, lulled into insensibility � the“fantasy” and “enchantment” of tourism used to compensate for a lack ofreal travel � for the otherwise earthbound condition of the mass.

Nonetheless, VR space tourism not only reflects the progression andmetamorphoses in tourist practice and production but also has the poten-tial to influence both the aspirations and prospects of our space futures.VR technologies may “offer new resources and new disciplines for the con-struction of imagined selves and imagined worlds” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 3),but this also means that virtual tourism reflects upon the wider conditionand transformation of human societies and suggests that new modes of per-ception, interface navigation, data mapping, and the manipulation of com-plex three-dimensional spaces will not only become part of everyday life,but be made a measure of our general disposition toward futures beyondthe planet. Alongside these changes will be attempts to capitalize upon the“tourist traffic” in outer space. The codes that dictate virtual space mayalso become moral or social codes, a new set of rules, classifications, andborders dictating how we approach, establish, and police the presence oftourists in outer space. In the meantime, it appears that the sophistication,supplementation, and compensations of dwelling and traveling in virtualspace will progress; as this technologically mediated tourist practice notonly continues to fracture into wider arrangements and rearrangements ofreal and imagined destinations, it may also influence the design and direc-tion of how we move on and outside our own planet.

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